A nine-foot-tall statue of Sherlock Holmes stands outside the Marylebone exit to the Baker Street Tube station in London. Solemn and gaunt, Holmes looms over traffic in his trademark Inverness cape and deerstalker, pipe in hand. The statue, London’s first to its famous fictional denizen, was unveiled in 1999. It was primarily funded by the Abbey National Building Society, formerly of 219-229 Baker Street, which, starting in 1932, began receiving the thousands of letters mailed each year to Sherlock Holmes at his 221B Baker Street address. At one point, the society employed a full-time secretary to answer them. When in 1990, the Sherlock Holmes museum down the street (in [...]

A couple of issues back Wired had a short piece on the Asylum, a low-budget studio specializing in shamelessly derivative knockoffs that are not-so-affectionately dubbed "mockbusters." B-movie producers have been cribbing from Hollywood for decades, but none have done so as brazenly or efficiently as the Asylum, which for the past six years has churned out titles like Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, The Terminators, The Day the Earth Stopped, and, of course, last summer's Transmorphers: Fall of Man.

Now Topless Robot points to the preview for their forthcoming version of Sherlock Holmes, which seems to be everything promised and more! Enjoy.

So, uh, yeah, that Sherlock Holmes trailer? WHAT? I actually hope that the movie is a huge success, because maybe it'll encourage Guy Ritchie to turn his hand to other classics of English literature. Can you imagine his Mr. Micawber? "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result you get this GIANT FLAMING TORCH RIGHT UP YOUR BACKSIDE, MATEY."